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June 02, 2016

On holiday in Australia recently, one of the most bizarre places I came across was Cockatoo Island. It’s a UNESCO world heritage site in the middle of Sydney Harbour and, until Sunday, the host of Sydney’s twentieth art biennale. Before all this, though, it has had an extraordinary past.

Named after its sulphur-crested inhabitants, Cockatoo Island has, since 1839, been a prison for particularly bad convicts; an Industrial School for Girls, which took over the same prison buildings (you can still see crumbling-brick cells, ceramic sinks, faded tiles and childlike scribbles on the walls – imagine what it must have been like for those school children); and a ship-building yard, at its peak during the Second World War. The island then lay dormant for a decade in the 1990s, underwent restoration from 2001, and was opened to the public in 2007. There are camping areas now, too. (I’m not quite sold on that idea.)

April 29, 2016

Amid all the outcry and ill feeling surrounding Ken Livingstone’s Hitler-was-a-Zionist “gaffe”, it’s probably worth referring to a few historical facts. I’m not sure which history book the former London mayor has been reading, but it presumably isn’t Peter Longerich’s Holocaust (2010), in which we can find (on page 67, should Livingstone wish to consult it) a very clear explanation of the Reich’s policy on Palestine:

March 20, 2015

What links Lisbon, Bodmin Moor, the Amazon, Satyajit Ray, the early Islamic caliphates and the living goddess tradition in the Nepalese Newari community? If you can answer this question then the chances are you were at the Tabernacle in Notting Hill on Tuesday night for the fascinating How ToTravel and Explore evening, courtesy of the How To Academy.

May 29, 2014

In my post about Australasian soldiers in later twentieth-century conflicts last week, I almost mentioned a minor incident in After the Fire, a Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld (one of the novelists who'll be speaking on the ANZACs at War panel). "Hold up your hand whoever's dad is out in Korea now", a teacher orders in class one day, in 1952. One boy, Leon, feeling sorry for the others whose fathers hadn't volunteered, holds up his hand "so high his shoulder clicked". The teacher shows them photographs of "the kinds of thing you got in Korea", to Leon's delight:

"You got muskrats and brown bears and tigers. His dad liked animals, he'd be excited to see a tiger. Leon imagined him lying on his front very still among the ferns and watching a tiger roll with its babies in the long grass."

It's a fearfully ominous naivety Wyld captures here, I think; the sort of enthusiastic innocence also found in, say, newsreel footage of happy soldiers marching off to certain victory with a dash of glory thrown in for good measure.

Something like Leon's view of the supposed joys of signing up and seeing the (natural) world is there, too, in the work of another of the speakers, Mark Dapin's Spirit House, in which the boy-narrator simply tells the reader: "I liked war, all the guns and tanks and uniforms . . . ." And sure enough, it's there again in C. K. Stead's Talking about O'Dwyer, in the war games of two boys, among the bamboo trees – between them, they "shot a lot of Jerries".

I'm guessing, in other words, that we could find ourselves talking tomorrow morning just as much about innocence as experience – youthful expectations running up against bloody realities.

A further point about Leon's dad, though, and one that has acquired renewed and ugly pertinence back here in the Old Country: he's a first-generation immigrant. Goaded into fighting – not exactly handed the white feather, not mobbed in the street – but clearly challenged by the immediate community around him to do something for his adopted country as it mobilizes for war, he and his wife argue in Dutch about his trying to prove he's "more Australian than anything else" (while she is described as a "Flaming clog wog" by somebody who presumably feels herself to be more of a native). How better to prove that, his actions imply, than to go off and fight for your country, and demonstrate your willingness to lay down your life for it?

So maybe we'll end up talking about immigration, too, then – albeit not in a sense that any gaffe-happy British politician, enjoying his moment in the sun, would understand. "You know what I mean."

May 20, 2014

It’s not exactly the most stunning view New Zealand has to offer: a misty morning on North Head, overlooking Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour. Note the disused building, though – a remnant of the country’s coastal fortifications built in anticipation of attack, at various points in the past century, from Japan or the Soviet Union. A network of tunnels runs through this strategically significant promontory, connecting one heavy artillery position to another; apparently, the big guns were never fired in anger, and, as I learned a few years ago, when I took this photograph, the hill is now a national park.

New Zealand’s soldiers, by contrast, saw no shortage of action abroad – most famously alongside their Australian counterparts at Gallipoli during the First World War. The centenary of that prolonged battle falls next year, and will no doubt feature the same sort of reflection and revision of the historical revision that we’ve already seen in relation to the outbreak of the war in 1914. Less widely acknowledged outside Australasia, perhaps, is the part that these expeditionary forces, the ANZACs (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) played in later conflicts: Australia’s most sustained military engagement, for example, was apparently in Vietnam, and it sparked the same kind of controversies there that it did elsewhere.

Writing about war’s power to beget literature in last week’s TLS diary column, J. C. noted that, besides the obvious poetry of the First and Second World Wars, Vietnam gave us memoirs by Tobias Wolff and Michael Herr, Korea Chaim Potok’s I Am the Clay and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (published in 1961, regarded by the author as a comment on the 1950s, but based on his own experiences as a bomber pilot dated from a decade earlier). Iraq, though? “If something of the calibre of The Quiet American has emerged from the conflict, we haven’t heard about it.”

I’ve heard of several Australians and Kiwi writers, on the other hand, who have written about both the front line and its delayed impact on life back home – distinctive work, I feel, for the dislocation between antipodean communities and Old World theatres of war. There is C. K. Stead’s Talking about O’Dwyer, for example, in which a Kiwi recalls how it all seemed to be happening “over there”, even though Auckland had black-outs, rationing and “signs saying DIG FOR VICTORY”. (Things briefly look more alarmingly close to home after Pearl Harbour and the Germans sink a ship, the bullion-laden RMS Niagara, “not far north of Auckland”.)

There is also Evie Wyld’s After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, a powerful dramatization of life after Korea and Vietnam for generations of men – and there’s a novel I started reading only yesterday, Spirit House by Mark Dapin, which begins with a brutal bulletin, from 1944, in territory that Ian Watt, the author of The Rise of the Novel, would have recognized from his time as a prisoner of war working on the Burma railway.

They’re not the only ones, of course, but, along with Ashley Hay (whose novel The Railwayman’s Wife features not only memories of war but, Russian doll-style, memories of writing about war), Evie Wyld, C. K. Stead and Mark Dapin are the writers with whom I’ll be discussing all of this (disarmed Auckland hillocks included, maybe, who knows?) at King’s College London on May 30, as part of the Australia and New Zealand Festival of Literature and Arts. TLS readers – and anybody who happens to read this blog, would you believe it – can purchase two tickets for the price of one for this event, ANZACs at War: Writing about WWII and Vietnam, merely by entering the code TLS241 at the virtual checkout. I can only assume it’s going to be a lively discussion, with plenty of knowledgeable opinions voiced – although whether that necessarily makes it an easier or a more difficult discussion to chair, I’m not entirely sure.